In case you haven’t heard yet, China has gone back on its promise to Hong Kong that it will allow open nominations for the 2017 elections.

In August 2014 China’s top legislative committee ruled that voters will only have a choice from a list of two or three candidates selected by a nominating committee. Since the nominating committee is very much pro-Beijing, it is likely that any candidates who oppose China and want change for Hong Kong will not be selected. If this continues, there will be no change for Hong Kong unless it’s ‘approved’ by the big guns in China.

Although Hong Kong technically ‘belongs’ to China, It has it’s own legal system and rights but now China has basically said “Fuck it, HK, I don’t care what we promised, we’re just gonna control your government even more just because we fucking want to”

Controlled democracy is not a democracy at all.

Right Now, Pro-Democracy activists in Hong Kong, the largest group being “Occupy Central” are holding rallies in protest along side student campaigners who held a 5 day boycott of classes. Hundreds of students rushed Hong Kong government headquarters Sept. 26, resulting in clashes with riot police. At least 28 people were injured, including police. More than 60 people were arrested including a prominent student activist and a local politician. The students chanted the slogan: “No fear for civil disobedience” as they were led away by police. It is alleged that pepper spray and tear gas has been used against protesters without mercy. I know that my cousins are protesting against this right now and I hope for them to keep safe.

Many people fear that the Tienanmen Square Massacre incident is happening again in Hong Kong.

I know that HK is only small but that doesn’t mean we should be ignored.

Hey! Can you comment on the Copenhagen shootings and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in Europe? Interested to hear your thoughts given the amount of people saying its unrelated to antisemitism and instead in protest of Israel.

it’s antisemitic.

you don’t desecrate cemeteries of one group of oppressed people to protest their genocide/occupation of another oppressed people. that’s not a protest, that’s antisemitic violence

anti-zionist movements must acknowledge the fact that global (and especially european) antisemitism fuels zionism and support for israel among jews. we deserve a safe place to exist in the world, and increasingly our home countries are extremely unsafe. goyim are responsible for creating the need for israel’s settler colonialism in the first place.

antisemitism must be crushed out of antizionist movements. antizionist movements must fight against antisemitism.

and for that matter, global jewry should not be held responsible for the crimes of israel. despite what israel claims, it does not represent all jews and neither do all jews represent israel.

Air pollution in Asia may be changing weather patterns in the United States.

Increasingly intense storms in the United States might have an unexpected origin: Asian air pollution. Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have found that aerosols from across the Pacific strengthen extratropical cyclones—a type of storm system that drives much of our country’s weather.

Asia is home to the world’s 20 most polluted cities, but that dirty air doesn’t stay put, as the above animation of aerosol emissions shows. Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses around particles, and an influx of particulate matter—say, from a coal-fired power plant—can produce bigger, badder clouds. So far, the atmospheric scientists have only looked at how pollution from the continent affects North American weather, but they expect that the effects are global in scale. When countries around the world finalize carbon emissions commitments this year, let’s hope they remember we’re on different sides of the same planet.

I'm in Oklahoma right now and we're all furious about the AP-History course removal. Some debater friends and I are already planning to meet w/government officials, and I've heard about a protest stirring at my school. There's already a list of about 30 people who have signed up for a class outside of school where we'll actually be talking about America's history w/o local bias. We're ready to show them exactly how much power their unenforceable, piece of crap legislation has over any of us.

Good for you, seriously that shit needs to be challenged

I don’t even understand the concern with anti-american sentiment we’re not in the fucking cold war anymore wtf

Help Mjolnir Project make Hammers for Soldiers

Since 2006 the Mjolnir Project has distributed a Thor’s Hammer amulet to any active duty personnel stationed at home or abroad, who needs one, for free. Its our way of saying “Thank you for serving our Country. And you are not forgotten back home!” http://whitehartforge.com/

But we need your help. By purchasing one of these T shirts you can help us with the cost of buying steel and postage. It’ll be like taking a turn at the anvil yourself! So won’t you help us make hammers for soldiers?

Note: We are in no way affiliated with The Mjolnir Project, but felt this project is worth letting you know of. There’s just a few shirts left untl the goal of a hundred shirts - and they are really cheap, so go ahead and buy one of several, and treat your (military?) friends with something nice.

I have just returned from my first trip as Deputy Secretary, to the Republic of Korea, China, and Japan. Going to Northeast Asia first was no coincidence. It reflects the importance that the President and the Secretary attach to the region as a whole and to our rebalance policy. At each of these stops, I had good meetings with my government counterparts covering a broad agenda of bilateral, regional, and global issues. I also met with next generation leaders, many of whom already have strong bonds to the United States through our exchange programs both here and in their home countries.

this is random but I want to ask you questions about college(if recall correctly you are in college/uni right?) first how often do you attend lectures for your classes? how many classes do you take? do you get a lot of tests? is it anything like highschool? do you have to study more than you did in highschool? omg you must think i'm really weird i'm really curious about this because I know nothing about college and yeah sorry this is weird. also do you have any advice for a new college student?

before i answer your questions, you have to remember that i attend university in my home country, mexico, and that our system could differ from your country’s, so yeah:

since i am majoring in finances, the years of university are 4. the first half was in the morning and now i am in the second half and attend classes in the night, around 5-6 hours

like 2-3 classes per day

nah, we only get two partials (in the semester) and one final (at the end of the semester)

not at all, you are free from attending classes or not, teachers don’t push you into attending bc we are adults and supposed to take responsibility of our own actions

i’ve never been one to study bc it’s easy for me to get things during class, but if you are the type who has to study then yeah, read a lot and practice your analysis and reasoning

nah i don’t think you’re weird

my advice for you is: don’t skip classes. don’t listen to what people on this site tell you (remember that if u dont feel like going to school, dont go (: u owe no explanations blahblah) because that’s not how the world works, and the way you behave in university, is what can give you help to be recommended by teachers to corporations and perhaps be recruited. university is the first step to the job market, and remember that every action you take, can contribute to either help you in some future or haunt you as the mistake you shouldn’t have made. it’s not that i want to scare you, bc university is fun! it’s great to learn new stuff but honestly, don’t take it lightly and show that you are responsible, serious, compromised and ambitious.

The lynching and torture of blacks in the Jim Crow South weren’t just acts of racism. They were religious rituals.

The cliché is that Americans have a short memory, but since Saturday [National Prayer Breakfast] , a number of us have been arguing over medieval religious wars and whether they have any lessons for today’s violence in the Middle East.

For those still unaware, this debate comes after President Obama’s comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, where—after condemning Islamic radical group ISIS as a “death cult”—he offered a moderating thought. “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ … So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”

It’s a straightforward point—“no faith has a particular monopoly on religious arrogance”—that’s become a partisan flashpoint, as conservatives harangue the president for “equating” crusading Christians to Islamic radicals, accuse him of anti-Christian beliefs, and wonder why he would mention a centuries-old conflict, even if it has some analogies to the present day.

What we have missed in the argument over the Crusades, however, is Obama’s mention of slavery and Jim Crow. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates puts his focus on religious justifications for American bondage, and it’s worth doing the same for its post-bellum successor. And since we’re thinking in terms of religious violence, our eyes should turn toward the most brutal spectacle of Jim Crow’s reign, the lynching.

For most of the century between the two Reconstructions, the bulk of the white South condoned and sanctioned terrorist violence against black Americans. In a new report, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documents nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—between 1877 and 1950, which the group notes is “at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported.”

For his victims, “Judge Lynch”—journalist Ida B. Wells’ name for the lynch mob—was capricious, merciless, and barbaric. C.J. Miller, falsely accused of killing two teenaged white sisters in western Kentucky, was “dragged through the streets to a crude platform of old barrel staves and other kindling,” writes historian Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. His assailants hanged him from a telephone pole, and while “the first fall broke his neck … the body was repeatedly raised and lowered while the crowd peppered it with small-arms fire.” For two hours his corpse hung above the street, during which he was photographed and mutilated by onlookers. Finally, he was cut down and burned.

More savage was the lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child, killed for protesting her husband’s murder. “[B]efore a crowd that included women and children,” writes Dray, “Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death.”

These lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes, “celebratory acts of racial control and domination.” They were rituals. And specifically, they were rituals of Southern evangelicalism and its then-dogma of purity, literalism, and white supremacy. “Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort,” writes historian Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. “It would be inconceivable that they could inflict pain and torment on the bodies of black men without imagining that violence as a religious act, laden with Christian symbolism and significance.”

The God of the white South demanded purity—embodied by the white woman. White southerners would build the barrier with segregation. But when it was breached, lynching was the way they would mend the fence and affirm their freedom from the moral contamination, represented by blacks and black men in particular. (Although, not limited to them. Leo Frank, lynched in 1915, was Jewish.) The perceived breach was frequently sexual, defined by the myth of the black rapist, a “demon” and “beast” who set out to defile the Christian purity of white womanhood. In his narrative of the lynching of Henry Smith—killed for the alleged rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance—writer P.L. James recounted how the energy of an entire city and country was turned toward the apprehension of the demon who had devastated a home and polluted an innocent life.”

James wasn’t alone. Many other defenders of lynching understood their acts as a Christian duty, consecrated as God’s will against racial transgression. “After Smith’s lynching,” Wood notes, “another defender wrote, ‘It was nothing but the vengeance of an outraged God, meted out to him, through the instrumentality of the people that caused the cremation.’ ” As UNC–Chapel Hill Professor Emeritus Donald G. Mathews writes in the Journal of Southern Religion, “Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” The “sacred order” was white supremacy and the “holiness” was white virtue.

I should emphasize that blacks of the era understood lynching as rooted in the Christian practice of white southerners. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” wrote NAACP leader Walter White in 1929, “No person who is familiar with the Bible-beating, acrobatic, fanatical preachers of hell-fire in the South, and who has seen the orgies of emotion created by them, can doubt for a moment that dangerous passions are released which contribute to emotional instability and play a part in lynching.” And while some church leaders condemned the practice as contrary to the Gospel of Christ—“Religion and lynching; Christianity and crushing, burning and blessing, savagery and national sanity cannot go together in this country,” declared one 1904 editorial—the overwhelming consent of the white South confirmed White’s view.

The only Southern Christianity united in its opposition to lynching was that of black Americans, who tried to recontextualize the onslaught as a kind of crucifixion and its victims as martyrs, flipping the script and making blacks the true inheritors of Christian salvation and redemption. It’s that last point which should highlight how none of this was intrinsic to Christianity: It was a question of power, and of the need of the powerful to sanctify their actions.

Still, we can’t deny that lynching—in all of its grotesque brutality—was an act of religious significance justified by the Christianity of the day. It was also political: an act of terror and social control, and the province of private citizens, public officials, and powerful lawmakers. Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina defended lynching on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and President Woodrow Wilson applauded a film that celebrated Judge Lynch and his disciples.

Which is all to say that President Obama was right. The vastly different environments of pre–civil rights America and the modern-day Middle East belies the substantive similarities between the fairly recent religious violence of our white supremacist forebears and that of our contemporary enemies. And the present divide between moderate Muslims and their fanatical opponents has an analogue in our past divide between northern Christianity and its southern counterpart.

This isn’t relativism as much as it’s a clear-eyed view of our common vulnerability, of the truth that the seeds of violence and autocracy can sprout anywhere, and of the fact that our present position on the moral high ground isn’t evidence of some intrinsic superiority.

First world school problems:They don't allow me to wear what I want and style my hair the way I like it. Our lunch sucks.

Third world school problems:How do eighty students fit in a classroom for thirty? Are three school shifts not enough to accommodate them all? The students have nothing to eat back home, they don't have anything free to eat here either. OMG your schools have buses that take you home??? Our teachers are leaving to work in 1st world countries for a better life.

Summary: The relationships between the doctors at Shield Memorial can be described by only one word: Complicated. Things get even messier the day Chief of Staff, Peggy Carter hires her old friend Melinda May as their new Head of Cardio.

We’ve been receiving inquiries regarding the doujinshi we’ll be selling for Comiket Special 6, especially since not everyone will be able to go to the event.

After the event, you’ll be able to buy the remaining stock of the doujinshi. There will probably be enough copies left for the online buyers (Tange will be handling the domestic buyers, the buyers from our home country), but if the demand is high, we’ll have to request for a reprint from the doujinshi printing company.

When I moved to America, my parents planned on becoming citizens. I am a naturalized citizen and I share dual citizenship between America and my home-country, Latvia. When I was becoming a citizen of America I was forced to change my surname. In my home country, our surnames are masculine or feminine based on our gender from birth. That meant that my surname, Balode, the feminine form of the masculine surname, Balodis, that my biological father had (that's a completely different story)had to be changed from Balode to Balodis on my documentation of citizenship for the U.S.. Whenever I go back to Latvia for holiday or to see family, the officers at customs always look at me like I'm crazy. It annoys the heck out of me and I don't think that American policies should be that way- officials should respect cultures that have a different way of using surnames. This kind of issue has been going on for o few centuries and should be changed.

Today is World Wildlife Day and this is a chance for us to reflect and think about the animals around the world, in our home countries and in countries far away. We have to think about what we can do to protect these wonderful animals and what the world will be like if we don’t.

In this blog I am going to tell you about four different animals; the tiger, the African elephant, the giant panda, and the African rhino.

Tiger (Panthera tigris).The tiger is the largest big cat and also one of the most endangered. Three of the nine known subspecies of tiger are already extinct, and a fourth - the South China tiger - hasn’t been seen in the wild since the 1970s.

Tigers used to roam across all of Asia but now their home is within 7% of their original range. Their homes are in isolated forests across 13 countries.

Tigers will live and hunt alone unless they have a family. The tigers striped coat helps them to remain camouflaged as the stalk and ambush their prey. Each tiger has it’s own unique set of stripes just like a human has their own unique finger print. Unlike most cats, tigers like water and love to swim.

Over the last century wild tiger number have dropped over 95%. Poaching and loss of habitat are the main causes and are persistent threats. As few as 3,200 tigers live in the wild today. There are more tigers in captivity in the US than there are in the wild.

But there is some good news for tigers! India’s tiger population has greatly increased according to a 2014-15 India tiger estimation report. The report has found the population of wild tigers in the country increased from 1,706 in 2010 to 2,226 in 2014!

WWF continues to help these tigers and hopes there numbers will be doubled by 2022.

African Elephant (Loxodonta africana).The Africa elephant is the world’s largest land animal. There are two subspecies of African elephants - the larger Savannah elephant, which roams the plains and woodlands, and the smaller forest elephant, which lives in the forests of central Africa.

Female African elephants are very social and will stay in a strongly bonded group - called herds - with their relatives their entire lives. Males are more solitary and will wonder by themselves. Sometimes they will form a small group with other males. Elephants need a lot of space to find food and water - they can roam areas bigger than 30,000 sq km.

The African elephants’ range has declined by over 50% since 1979 - and this is resulting in their population falling. The biggest threats to a wild elephant is poaching, loss of habitat, and conflict with people.

There are only around 600,000 elephants left in the wild and this intelligent and powerful animal is classed as vulnerable. WWF aims to create stability for the elephant population and their habitats in 20 landscapes by 2017. They are currently focusing mainly on the illegal wildlife trade where people poach the elephants and then sell their meat and, highly sought after, ivory tusks.

Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca).The panda is a very charismatic and universally-loved species and is the symbol of the World Wildlife Fund organisation. The panda is one of the rarest and most endangered bears in the world.

Pandas were once spread throughout China, northern Vietnam and northern Burma, but now they are only found in six isolated mountain ranges in Gansu, Shaanix and Sichuan Provinces in south-central China.

This distinctive black and white creature usually lives a solitary life. Pandas are good swimmers and excellent tree climbers but they spend most of their time feeding - sometimes 14 hours a day eating mainly bamboo, which makes up 99% of their diet.

Three-quarters of wild pandas now live in nature reserves but they are still endangered. Nearly half of all giant pandas were lost between the early 1970s and the late 1990s - mainly due to loss of habitat and poaching. Habitat loss and poaching are still huge threats today.

But there is some good news for wild pandas! Wild panda numbers have increased by 16.8% since the 2004 survey! They have increased by 268 to 1,864 in the last ten years.

African Rhino (White rhino - Ceratotherium simum) (Black rhino - Diceros bicornis).There are two species of African rhino - the white rhino and the black rhino. Despite their names they are both the same dark grey-brown colour. It is thought that the name ‘white rhino’ is a misinterpretation of the Afrikaans word ‘wyd’ referring to its square upper lip. Black rhinos have hooked lips.

Most African rhinos are found in four countries - South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Kenya - where they mainly roam grassland and the open Savannah. These armoured giants are vegetarian and eat large amounts of food every day.

Poaching is the main reason for the loss in African rhino numbers as the horns are highly sought after.

White rhino.The white rhino is a huge conservation success story. The population of white rhinos has recovered from less than 100 in 1895 to over 20,000 today. Sadly there are no more northern white rhinos left in the wild and there is only a small handful in captivity.

Black rhino.The black rhino is smaller than the white rhino and has three remaining subspecies. A fourth - the western black rhino - was declared extinct in 2011. About 96% of black rhinos were lost to large-scale poaching between 1970 and 1992. There are now just 4,800 left in the wild today.

WWF’s goal is to increase African rhino numbers in at least five key populations by 5% each year, and to establish two new rhino populations by 2020.

So now you know a little bit more about these animals. What can you do to help? There are a few thing you can do to help!

Hold a fundraiser and give all proceeds to WWF.

Make a donation to WWF.

Become a WWF member for just £3 a month.

Adopt an animal with WWF!

Or, if you have no money to spare, you can simply sign any petitions that WWF has.

Another thing you can do if you do not have money to spare is simply raise awareness about WWF and what they do. WWF is a very well known organisation and you may think they don’t need anymore awareness but they do! Everyone may know about WWF but not everyone will help WWF to complete their goals and help save the animals of the world.

Imagine this, imagine how the world would be without any animals. Would you want you children or grandchildren to grow up seeing wild animals only on the television or in a zoo? Never even getting the chance to go to a new country to see them live their lives in the wild. I wouldn’t.

What I want you to do now is reblog this post. Then go to WWF’s website and find out more about what they do, sign a petition, maybe even donate or adopt an animal if you can.

No one would put their children in a boat unless the sea is safer than the land… no one chooses refugee camps, or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is safer than fourteen men who look like your father.

No one could take it, stomach it, no one’s skin would be tough enough, the “go home blacks, refugees, dirty immigrants, asylum seekers sucking our country dry”… How do the words, dirty looks, roll off your back? Maybe it’s because the blow is softer than a limb torn off, or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs, or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble, than bone, than your child’s body in pieces.

I want to go home. But home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of a gun, and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore, unless home told you to quicken your legs, leave your clothes behind, crawl through the desert, wade through the ocean, drown, save, be hungry, beg, forget pride, your survival is more important.

No one leaves home unless home is a sweaty voice in your ear, saying "Leave. Run away from me now.I don’t know what I’ve become. But I know that anywhere is safer than here.